The Power Of Curves In Photoshop – 3 Best Tips

Ever wondered what some of the other uses were for the Curves adjustment layer? In today’s video, I’m gonna show you the power of curves with three tips, coming up.

Correct Skin Tones

Okay, so this is tip number one. I’m going to correct the skin tone here. So I’m going to come down to the new group icon, create a group. So I’m gonna come up here to the Quick Selection tool. And I’m going to select the skin. And any other area that I want to do the correcting on. And if I go into the Quick Mask, and use my Brush tool, I can paint in some other areas a little bit easier. I just wanna paint where the hair is. Now the reason I’m doing a selection here is because I just want the effect, or the correction, to be on the skin. And if I had a different background it would affect that whole background behind me. Not so much in this case, ’cause it’s just a white background. So okay, this doesn’t have to be perfect. And hit Q to get out of Quick Mask. And I’m gonna hit the New Layer Mask icon on the group. And the reason I have a group with the layer mask on it is because any adjustment layer that I put in that group it’s just gonna work on that particular layer mask. And now I’m gonna add the Curves adjustment layer. And it’s in the group. But what we need are some samples of skin or skin tones. And I’m gonna put a link in the description, and you can download this. You don’t need to give me your email address or anything. I have one here that I’m going to use. And I’m just going to move it up here. And I’m gonna put it above this group. And there we go. This is going to be the skin tone chart that we’re going to sample from. So now on the Curves Properties here you have the black point, mid point and white point eyedroppers here. First of all, if you’re using your eyedropper you might wanna check what your sample is. This is an 11 x 11 average sample. Make sure that it’s not point sample, at least. And I’m gonna come up here to the midpoint eyedropper. And double-click on that. And select this darker skin tone right here, it doesn’t have to be exactly, but it works a little bit better when skin tone is darker. Say okay. And I’m gonna say no, I don’t want it to be a default. And I’m going to click… On what I believe to be is a mid tone. And you can see that it changed it, and corrected it. So you can click around if you don’t get it the first time. But see here we go. So far we’ve got our skin tone back. You can see here from our curves that our… Red, green and blue curves have been changed. And here’s the total RGB tone curve, but that’s corrected now. You can stop here if you want. There’s a couple of things you can do here. You can adjust the Curves adjustment layer opacity. And the other thing you can do is you can change the blend mode to color. And so that Curves adjustment is really just affecting the hue and saturation. Now you could add a Levels adjustment layer and change that to luminosity. And you can change the mid-tone slider if you wanted to adjust the brightness of the color. And there you go, that is tip number one. Here’s the before and here’s the after.

Fix Color Cast

Okay so here we have tip number two. This image has like a green color cast because well it’s in a very green area. All the trees and it’s just throwing green all over the place. And it’s something you probably wouldn’t notice if you’re with your camera and you’re right in the middle of it. But you get home, get on your computer and you can tell. So this tip #2, we’re gonna correct that color cast. So if you double-click on a new curves layer. Press ALT or Option and click on the Auto button, there are some settings back here it’s actually called Auto Color Correction Options. And all these different algorithms that Photoshop has built in, and you can see every time you click on one of them it affects the color differently or that cast. And a lot of times you can click on find dark and light colors and that’ll work. But then there are some times where you actually have to do this other little trick. And reset this Curves adjustment layer. And if we look at RGB levels you can see down here like in the red for instance, the black point is way over, it’s not even near any part of the curve. And same with green, it’s way over there on the corner. And blue it’s, yeah it’s closer. Let’s use the black point eyedropper and click on a dark point in the image. Now see, it took care of it right away. But we did that by looking at the histogram and going to the right eyedropper. Our red, you can see where the black point has been adjusted over more to the right. Same with the green point, or the black point on the green curve. And the blue pretty much stayed the same. But that was tip number two, taking out that green color cast. Here we have the before, and here we have the after.

Targeted Adjustment Points

Okay here is tip number three. Now with a new Curves adjustment layer, click here on the properties. And there is this little hand up here. Says, “Click and drag an image to modify the curve.” I click on that. Look at the little circle in the Curves adjustment… Along that line, how it’s changing. So I’m coming down the image and like right there it’s saying that that is a highlight. And I am coming down further and somewhere in there it says, that’s a midpoint. And I keep on going down further. And I’m going into the shadows. But that is going to give you kind of a direction in case you don’t know where to start in an image, and where your shadows are, and your highlights. You can use this as a guide. The thing you wanna be careful is, you don’t wanna have too many points too close together because it will basically destroy the image. If I come all the way up here, you see this area right down here, let’s highlight. If I drag up that’s way too much, but you could see what’s going on here. So it’s made a point way up there. We can drag it down. If I keep of coming down the curve, down here is shadows, and I can bring up the shadows in my image. I can come anywhere in between here and use it to my advantage to try and see what other points that I wanna make along here. Now like I say, you don’t wanna make too many points. This is the idea. Don’t want that point. But as I’m moving through the image I can see where it’s possibly going to affect. Now if I do a before and after, you could see that it’s allowed me to target certain areas. And like I say, you can’t make too many points because it will just be a crazy curve. But this is so that you can target certain areas of the image with the Curves adjustment layer. And so you can kind of, just by your eyes, say I want this certain area to be brighter, darker. And then, click on it and move up or down depending. And you can use this for color too. So if I choose blue. And this blue right here. It’s in a little bit of a blue, can raise it a little bit not too much. And go to the reds. And bring those up a little bit. And here’s a before and after. So that was tip number three, using this little hand up here to get areas that you specifically wanna change on the curves.